After leaving the electronic dance music drama "We Are Your Friends," there's a feeling of expertise by osmosis.

Like maybe you the audience member couldn't DJ an actual event. But you might have picked up enough of the film's lingo and philosophy to fool someone in a conversation at a party. "Rounders" was a movie like that. There are still guys down at Oaks Card Club who think they can play poker like John Malkovich's Teddy KGB.

When it sticks to the music, which is about 50 percent of the time, "We Are Your Friends" is a success. And when it strays to matters of love, friendship and loss, the film is predictable, slow and jarringly contrived. So there's half of a good movie here. You could do a lot worse during this dead movie week, when the summer blockbuster well has gone dry and the kids are going back to school.

Zac Efron is Cole Carter, a young and talented DJ who skipped college to pursue his dream with three buddies, and they're all dealing with the fallout. A chance meeting with older legend James Reed (Wes Bentley) starts a mentor/protégée relationship, which is muddled by Cole's loyalty to his idiot friends and attraction to Reed's younger girlfriend Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski).

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The writers seem to be going for a "Breaking Away" / "Swingers" vibe, trying to capture that transitional moment between high school and adulthood — where anything seems possible, until reality dictates that those possibilities might be out of reach. Director/co-writer Max Joseph has a sense of time and place, particularly when capturing the nuances of Cole's home in the San Fernando Valley.

Real-life composers of electronic dance music may find fault in the details, but for the uninitiated, the DJ scenes are very enjoyable. Joseph helms the movie like a good professor, judicially using exposition and even some animation to cover the basics, then building on the lesson throughout the film. An experienced documentarian (who also co-hosts MTV's "Catfish: The TV Show"), he knows it's always better to show than to tell.

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Efron is another strength. He has that Tom Cruise/Sandra Bullock ability to make audiences identify with his character and root for a positive result, even if his actions don't always merit a happy ending. The problem is the friends in "We Are Your Friends," who are all fairly simple stereotypes. The hothead. The quiet dreamer. The drug dealer. A predatory realtor shows up as their day job employer, with predictable third act results. A lovemaking sequence is shot in the shadows, looking like a scene-for-scene remake of the Cruise/Kelly McGillis post-volleyball romp in "Top Gun." Two tragic scenes at the climax are heavily telegraphed, and as a result don't have the intended emotional heft.

There's an earlier, better scene where James tells Cole to stop paying homage to other DJs and "find your own signature." The makers of "We Are Your Friends" got halfway there, and then lost the beat.